Carolyn Surrick, viola da gamba has a B.A. in music from the University of California Santa Cruz and an M.A. in musicology from George Washington University. She founded Ensemble Galilei in 1990, and they started touring in 1995. The group has recorded fourteen CDs and has performed hundreds of concerts in 46 states, Mexico, and Canada. Ensemble Galilei pioneered and then toured multi-disciplinary projects starting in the 1990’s using pictures, prose and poetry, and music. Surrick produced five of these special projects including a partnership with The National Geographic Society for the creation of First Person: Stories from the Edge of the World as well as a collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art to produce First Person: Seeing America. Ensemble Galilei’s most recent tour with longtime collaborator, NPR’s Neal Conan, included award-winning journalist Anne Garrels. This extraordinary look at the lives of wounded warriors, and life as a war correspondent, is based on Surrick’s book, Between War and Here. A collaborator at heart, when the opportunity arose to create new work with Ronn McFarlane, she leapt. Their shared musical sensibilities and the extraordinary combination of the two instruments has been a revelation, for which she is deeply grateful.